Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Mountains are my friends!

Being starry-eyed,
tilting at windmills and the eternal optimist are among the labels that have
been bestowed upon me. But when it comes to NonStop, the right “jumps” continue
to be made giving me good cause to stay the course!

I have spent much of my time working for very large
organizations. From my earliest days, working at the steelworks that later
became a part of the giant BHP Billiton, at Nixdorf Computers and then, much
later at Tandem Computers, I always gravitated to off-beat projects. And within
these large corporations working on such off-beat projects didn’t always endear
me to either my colleagues or to my managers – aren’t you spending a little too
much time working on that obscure feature? As for long-term career prospects,
and being safely employed, I never placed too much weight on such things.

However, it has been working on these many different (mostly unheard of today)
product features that have proved to be the best education I could ever have
had. And it may be the foundation for the optimism that I feel today – there’s
always something a little better out there and no matter how much progress we
have made, there’s always more about to happen. The picture above is of the mountains,
viewed from my Boulder home, where the continuous line of peaks that make up
the continental divide fills the entire western horizon.

The back page of the July 21, 2012, issue of The Economist contained an
obituary of Roger Payne, a British mountain climber, who tragically passed away
earlier in July, engulfed in an avalanche as he led a party across Mount
Maudit, a peak adjacent to the more famous Mount Blanc. The writer finished
with the comments “as no one knew better than himself, there was no perfect
safety in mountains. But he would not have been in any other place, for, in
(the poet) Byron’s words, ‘Where rose the mountains, there to him were friends’”.

This past week I participated in one of my client’s annual sales kick-off
events – three days dedicated to setting the stage for the coming year in terms
of goals and expectations. What I particularly like about this client is how
they were among the very first established NonStop ISVs to realize that the
products they brought to market first on NonStop had much broader appeal, and
that with a little extra effort they have now established a complementary
marketplace that has seen essentially the same code base being used in
completely new and innovative ways.

Today, the challenge for vendors that have successfully stepped into adjacent
marketplaces with products initially designed for NonStop is just how much
attention they must give to NonStop, and for how long? After nearly four
decades contributing to IT, has the NonStop architecture run its course? As
this vendors’ CIO expressed it so succinctly, “are sales really flattening out
and are we seeing any signs suggesting that sales may be tapering off?” In
other words, does it make business sense to pull resources away from NonStop as
other marketplaces (for this vendor’s product) continue to show strength?

A clear reference to where NonStop was positioned on the traditional lifecycle
“bell curve”, and a topic that has continued to be raised of late among my
clients. Anxious to know more about the future of NonStop, they are a little
concerned over whether the good times for NonStop were coming to an end. Just
how many other products had persevered as long as NonStop and continued to be
relied upon, as they are, for as many years?

The topic of lifecycles has been a reoccurring theme in my postings to this
blog. In my post of December 25, 2011, “Falling down? Ouch!”, I wrote of how I am often reminded of the cycles we witness
in business – companies follow a lifecycle curve as does technology and
products. The simple bell-curve most of us a familiar with reminds us that
there are downward trends just as there are upward trends, and the trick for
any in business is to step out of a perceived downward trend, reinvent
themselves and ride a new trend upwards.

And in the much earlier post of August 14, 2009, “A
dedicated follower of fashion ...”, I went so far as to suggest that when
it comes to technology, some solutions have proven to have lives that outlive
the lifecycle where they first belonged. As the pendulum swings endlessly, or
so it seems, between centralized and distributed computing solutions (is cloud
computing nothing more than a return to centralized, once again?), I was to
ask, does each swing generate a new lifecycle and are the products enjoying
such long lives simply because they more adept at jumping to the new lifecycle?

It was only a few weeks earlier in the post of
July 31, 2009, “Getting
aligned ...”, I had observed that we just may see the development of a new
product lifecycle where NonStop begins to rapidly ‘take-off’; more than
compensating for any tapering we see with existing product lifecycles. I also
noted how traditional product and technology lifecycles may not tell the full
story, should a product be able to leap from one curve to another.

Should you tab even further back into my posts you may even come across the
post of February 18, 2009, “Game
changers!”, where I first raised the idea of when products successfully
jump from one technology lifecycle curve to another, what may have been viewed
as being close to end-of-life can suddenly become cool again when included as a
new entrant riding the upswing of a new lifecycle. Could the longevity NonStop
enjoys be simply a result of it having made a number of successful lifecycle
jumps? Could it really be as simple as that?

And what lifecycles has NonStop successfully managed to jump to, rising each
time to crest an even higher peak? In a recent post to the web publication,
realtime.ir.com, “A great kick-off event; game on!”,
I further looked at what was contributing to the success of NonStop (and
attributed much of the success to) jumping from one market lifecycle to
another, timing each jump to seamlessly transition from one that was tapering
off to another one rapidly ascending – from fault tolerance to OLTP and more
recently, to mission critical.

The energy I have in promoting NonStop may be less about looking at the peaks
nearby than wistful thoughts about what lies beyond all that I can see. The
mountains are my friends and while I am not a climber I do have some affinity
with all who look for an even higher peak to conquer. Yet the visible rise and
fall of each peak reinforces the natural order – these peaks belong to a
continuous chain of mountains.

When it comes to NonStop I see a continuation for many years to come, as the
architecture evolves in step with the ever-changing technology we see all
around us, ensuring NonStop is as applicable today as it has been for these
past four decades. Increasingly I am hearing stories of companies putting off
planned migrations away from NonStop simply because the economics make little
sense. Yes, the good times for NonStop will continue.

Downtime and outages of mission-critical applications continue to make
headlines, and for many companies this continues to represent unacceptable
risk. More importantly, what do you move to – as recent history at ACI
Worldwide has so clearly demonstrated, companies with a history of NonStop
systems supporting their mission-critical applications prefer to look for
alternative NonStop solutions rather than move to another platform. Yes, the trend
of declining costs of NonStop will continue, too!

There are many more technology lifecycles beyond what we see today – clouds,
big data, etc. NonStop may not find a place in all of them, but the point is
the opportunity to continue jumping to new ones and riding yet another wave as
it crests is not beyond reasonable probability. Yes, mountains are definitely
my friends and from the view I have today, there is no end in sight; whatever
trend lines for NonStop we might see today might easily be shadowed by an even
bigger peak just over the horizon.